Beyond ‘feminisms’: Refocusing the women's movement through the lens of liberation

Abstract

In 1974, in a lecture at Stanford University, entitled, “Marxism and Feminism” (published in the same year in the journal, Women's Studies), Herbert Marcuse (1974b, p. 279) stated that the Women's Liberation Movement was “perhaps the most important and potentially the most radical political movement that we have, even if the consciousness of this fact has not yet penetrated the Movement as a whole”. Marcuse saw the liberating potential of the movement in its critical consciousness – the light it shone on the invisible structures of oppression inherent in a patriarchal, capitalist system and the knowledge that the dismantling of this system was necessary to have a truly free world.

Citation

Walilko, V. (2009), "Beyond ‘feminisms’: Refocusing the women's movement through the lens of liberation", Dahms, H.F. (Ed.) Nature, Knowledge and Negation (Current Perspectives in Social Theory, Vol. 26), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 327-338. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0278-1204(2009)0000026016